I don’t have an actual poem to share today, but after Gen Con last week I’ve been thinking about random poetry. I’m weirdly drawn to the dice with letters on them, although I’ve never bought any because I can’t think of an actual use for them (writing letter by random letter sounds way more painful than even I’m willing to put up with) and I haven’t seen a 26-sided die with all the letters (there’s not really a 26-sided platonic solid), so it would involve multiple dice and some kind of system for deciding which die to go with at any given time anyway. Not really the stuff of fun random poetry building. But the *idea* of building random from poetry from dice is still pretty cool. So I went looking to see if anyone had come up with anything interesting along those lines.

What I found was this very intriguing project. Basically, the poet listened to the sounds of the numbers from 1-102 (because dice roll numbers, not letters or words) and chose words or very short phrases that sounded like those numbers. So “fifty” becomes “thrifty” and “sixty-two” becomes “coochy-coo”. Then you roll the dice to see what combination of number/words you come up with and arrange them as you please! Isn’t that creative and interesting? I thought so. I also thought it would be fun to try picking my own words for numbers and making my own set. I think it would be even more interesting to do something like this with a group of kids. It gets them to listen to sounds and experiment with language while having silly fun. You could even get blank dice (they sell them in various sizes and colors, but I’d go with white ones maybe an inch or larger on a side to make it easier to read what you write on them) and actually make your own! I think it would be fun, anyway.

I’m sure everyone else has great poetry today, so go check it out! The round-up is over at The Book Mine Set! Check it out!

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I've heard men complain of doing woman's work, and women complain of doing man's work, but I've never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!